Ridiculous: White Professor Under Fire For Reading MLK Letter to Students

Not a day goes by that we don’t see liberals on Facebook pushing their recommended “black lives matter” reading lists. The intent, we suppose, is to have white people give up their Stephen King and John Grisham for a long, thorough literary examination of their white privilege. The hope is that by immersing themselves in a bottomless pit of woke wisdom, these white readers will come out on the other side as clean and pristine as the liberals pushing these reading lists already are. And then, magically, we can “solve” racism in America.

Okay. Cool. We’re not sure that’s going to work, but hey, you never know. Certainly, it never hurts to open one’s mind and read some books that you might otherwise dismiss (although we have a deep suspicion that these liberals have never done the same). You might learn something. At the very least, you might gain an understanding of what certain people are talking about when you usually just think to yourself, where in the hell did they get THAT idea?

But we digress. What’s funny about our current moment in American progress is that political correctness and racial sensitivity has grown so cancerous that even these very white liberals can wind up stepping on the neverending field of landmines.

Take Professor W. Ajax Peris of the University of California Los Angeles. Peris is now in hot water at his university. Why? Did he kick off a lecture with a reading from Mein Kampf? Did he screw up and show his students some Ku Klux Klan literature?

Well, not quite.

From the Washington Free Beacon:

The University of California Los Angeles has launched an inquiry into a teacher for reading aloud Martin Luther King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” because the civil rights document includes the n-word.

In a department-wide email obtained exclusively by the Washington Free Beacon, UCLA political science chair Michael Chwe and two other department leaders condemned lecturer W. Ajax Peris’s use of the racially incendiary word in a lecture he was delivering about the history of racism against African Americans. UCLA officials said the department referred Peris, an Air Force veteran, to the university’s Discrimination Prevention Office (DPO) and urged students to come forward with complaints. The email also faulted the postdoctoral lecturer for showing a documentary to the class in which a lynching is described and not stopping the presentation when students complained.

“The lecturer also showed a portion of a documentary which included graphic images and descriptions of lynching, with a narrator who quoted the n-word in explaining the history of lynching. Many students expressed distress and anger regarding the lecture and the lecturer’s response to their concerns during the lecture,” said the letter, which was signed by Chwe, vice chair for graduate studies Lorrie Frasure, and vice chair for undergraduate studies Chris Tausanovitch. “We share students’ concerns that the lecturer did not simply pause and reassess their teaching pedagogy to meet the students’ needs.”

Sigh.

So a white, liberal professor says THE BAD WORD while quoting from one of the most famous anti-racist activists of all time, and now the studentry wants him tarred, feathered, and fired? At what point is someone going to stand up and say, enough is enough? It makes us think of a photo we saw last week of a white woman protester standing in front of a black cop, giving him the finger. It makes us think: What is this REALLY all about?

We’re sadly convinced that “racial justice” isn’t it.